Searching for other Cirque du Soleil advertisements on city buses it became obvious for me that all images played with similar emotions and they did it in a similar way. The different characters from the advertised show had either sad or melancholic expressions and furthermore the emotional expressions where not clear, not overexpressed like we are used to it from some other circus shows but they were natural, soft, nearly invisible, touching much more from the inside than through the eye.

This little finding made me search for more information about the Cirque du Soleil and about its other spectacles. Looking through material on their webpage I found further evidence that in many advertisements for their shows, like Alegria, Saltimbanco, Mistère … , there is played with a soft expression of melancholy (or at least expressions without smiling and open happiness). This is also true for most of their videos (http://www.cirquedusoleil.com/es-es/home.aspx#/es-es/home/europe/spain.aspx). There are very little moments when a character smiles openly, and even if this happens, these smiles are that small and that fragile that they rather seem to enforce the impression of sadness and melancholy.

‘But however’, I thought, ‘it seems to work’. This small sad or melancholic emotional touch stimulates silently somehow our imaginary universes. We feel moved by the pictures (something that I experienced myself and that I could see in the face of other people looking at the same bus advertisements).

I found out from the Cirque du Soleil webpage that since 1984 the Cirque du Soleil has constantly searched for ways to stimulate, work upon (or manipulate) and create imaginary worlds of the audience, searching for ways to touch our senses and to invoke emotions that can then become part of the spectacle. The people from Cirque du Soleil are experts in moving us, our imaginary and emotional universes, like a shaman might have been for societies long time ago. We can see their competency well reflected in the millions of visitors (their webpage talks about 100 million people) they have had in their different spectacles all around the globe. (http://www.cirquedusoleil.com/es-es/home.aspx#/es-ES/home/about.aspx)

But our little analysis wants to go a step further: How is it possible that in contrast to most advertisement and to what marketing tells about selling a product, Cirque du Soleil without expressions of happiness, comfortable ambient and hedonistic moments motivates such a big number of people to spend a quite high amount of money for seeing a spectacle advertised by melancholic faces and an uninviting soft sadness? How is it possible that the visitors are attracted by the idea to enter and disappear in “a world that is theatrical and mysterious, that represents a place between heaven and earth, mixing entertainment, the comedy, and spontaneity” that is neither promising happiness nor satisfaction? How do their ads create the emotional energy to motivate us for participating in a collective ritual initiated by and performed with the Cirque du Soleil?

For answering these questions we have to understand first that there is a crucial difference between two different forms of advertisement, on the one hand there is an advertisement for specific consumption objects, for products if we want to say so, on the other hand there is advertisement for the participation in a public ritual. In the first case an ad usually provokes a positive imagination in relation to a product, it links the product to a positive emotion and embeds it in a positive, enjoyable environment that is then slowly parallelised with the emotional and imaginary world of the consumer. Everything is about creating a narcissistic and self-oriented imagination about the moment of consumption wherein and wherefrom the individual has at least the impression to come a step closer to happiness and satisfaction. The object fills something we are lacking.

In the second case it is nearly the other way round, advertisement’s aim is the erasure of individuality and the sensation of individual happiness in the moment of consumption. It is rather an ad for a place where we can desire to disappear – in society, in the collective ritual. The collective ritual comes to us as a world where we can connect to old emotional energies that do not completely belong to us, and thereof we are able to construct new emotional worlds. The ritual is like a spring of renewal. The circus of these ads tells us and reflects the myth of an origin, an origin wherein happiness, sadness, fear, passion are not yet differentiated but are born out of an emotional undifferentiatedness. That is the magic about it. The sad emotional undifferentiatedness on the picture, the myth of origin hidden behind the picture’s meaning and the advertisement of a collective ritual belong together. Overexpressed emotions would destroy this impression. For collective rituals emotions work much better when they are mild, nearly invisible like in the ads of the bus.

The characters in this circus present something like archetypes of emotions, not yet there but at the point of appearing, also not yet differentiated, caught in a undefined melancholy. The characters their performance gives birth to the emotions as something social, nothing the characters carry inside themselves but that they create in Wechselwirkung (interrelation) with each other and the audience whose sympathy they have to win by webbing these emotional bonds. The clown is the example per excellence -always between laughing and crying, moving us to laugh with him, about him, creating identificatory and distancing moments at the same time, webbing an emotional complicity between us and him.

Now we just have to answer a last question: Why is this undifferentiatedness represented by an expression of melancholy? Melancholy is a very important and very present emotion in modernity (let’s just remember l’Spleen of Baudelaire). One of the reasons might be on the basis of this emotion we have learned to relate with our origin, with our myths in modernity. Whilst in other times the relation to our mythological centre might have been webbed with emotions of shame, or guilt, in modernity our myth tells us that we have lost the contact with our myths, leaving us as a society with nothing more than an empty melancholy. Therefore, melancholy represents the most original emotion for us as social beings in modern society. Melancholy serves best for representing and identifying with the myth of our modern world. It is from the primary – emotion of melancholy that we learn again and feel with the others the modern myth of the birth of emotions and of society.

The Cirque du Soleil might be or at least presents itself as a place where this experience is possible. That is why melancholy is the best emotion for advertising their collective rituals. The people Cirque du Soleil know what they do. Melancholy is everywhere, in the costumes, in the faces of the characters and also in the music that carries us through the celebration of this ritual of initiation and durability. All this turns the spectacle of the Cirque du Soleil in a part of our late modern magic, showing us a finite universe full of meaning, touching us through emotions – like a dream, a movie, a fairy-tale or a bolero. Whether this magic is true or just a simulation of capitalism stays open…

Music
Music often transports me like a sea!
Toward my pale star,
Under a ceiling of fog or a vast ether,
I get under sail;
My chest thrust out and my lungs filled
Like the canvas,
I scale the slopes of wave on wave
That the night obscures;
I feel vibrating within me all the passions
Of ships in distress;
The good wind and the tempest with its convulsions
Over the vast gulf
Cradle me. At other times, dead calm, great mirror
Of my despair!
— William Aggeler, The Flowers of Evil (Fresno, CA: Academy Library Guild, 1954)

La musique
Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867)

La musique souvent me prend comme une mer!
Vers ma pâle étoile,
Sous un plafond de brume ou dans un vaste éther,
Je mets à la voile;

La poitrine en avant et les poumons gonflés
Comme de la toile
J’escalade le dos des flots amoncelés
Que la nuit me voile;

Je sens vibrer en moi toutes les passions
D’un vaisseau qui souffre;
Le bon vent, la tempête et ses convulsions

Sur l’immense gouffre
Me bercent. D’autres fois, calme plat, grand miroir
De mon désespoir!

Knowing at least a little bit about North Korea and its latest history, about the scarcities that had shaken the country, the reasons for them and the consequences for the population, knowing something about the iron rule Kim Jong- Il had held over the country, many people started to ask themselves whether and how this can be really the reaction on the death of a man like Kim Jong-Il. How is it possible that people are not happy, how can they really cry, why are they really sad? The unbelievability of the crude fact that someone could have really liked this cruel man opened the space for wild speculations, speculations about the “realness” of the images. Journalists reacted  with strong scepticism, questioning the sincerity and realness of the emotions shown and tears dropped by the North Koreans, concluding that the people shown must be bought actors or extremely pressured people who had to perform the scenes, or that these people must be brainwashed. Accordingly, in the comments on “youtube”, people either made jokes and were extremely ironic about the North Koreans, or they doubted the “realness of the tears, if not of the whole videos”. They found the idea that this could be “real” unbearable, a fist in the face of democracy, contradicting the belief that we all desire the same political system.

Apart from knowing from other countries that our Western democracy might not be the solution and the desired political system for all people in the world. And without saying whether this political variety is good or bad, it is something else that is interesting for us. It is the question about the “realness” of the emotions that we can follow on the screen, and what we mean by that. Looking again through comments on youtube and articles on the subject, we can see that what people mainly meant by real emotions and “realness” is that the tears and screams, the crying and breaking down are and have to be an expression of the inner individual self. We see emotions as something extremely personal, their presentation as an insight into someone’s inner life. The emotions we see on the video are then personal expressions regarding Kim-Jong-Il’s death – spontaneous and uncontrolled, showing a deep personal love to their leader. That is why it seems so striking. But the whole question about the “realness of emotions” is wrong. There are no real emotions. Emotions and their performance are always at least to a great part learned and performed.  And it is in social rituals, like the moment of Kim-Jong-Il’s death were a society learns to perform and performs how it has learned emotions. But this process of learning has nothing to do with brainwashing or with the dictatorship, there is no society were emotions are not performed/learned in rituals.

If we just follow the definition of an ritual in Wikipedia we are able to reinterpret the situation. “A ritual is a set of actions, performed mainly for their symbolic value.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ritual) It may be prescribed by a religion or by the traditions of a community. The form, contents, and durations of a ritual are prescribed and not spontaneous at all. The performance of emotions follows clear rules for how strong and long they have to be performed. Their performance is strictly regulated. Rituals and emotions in rituals have to be performed individually or in groups when it is socially necessary. They help to show, perform and reinforce the social relations of those involved in the ritual. In the case of the people in North Korea, we are just seeing one of these social rituals – a ritual in the moment of death wherein all social members perform and demonstrate their respect regarding Kim-Jong-Il by breaking into tears, by shouting and screaming and where they perform and show their bond with their society as a whole.

What they are doing is then not to show their inner soul but in contrast to nivell out all individualism for performing a social ritual, to reinforce their social bonds in a moment of social weakness, in a moment when they as society as a whole are facing death. The question whether their performance is real or fake can just arise to us who believe that emotions are something deeply private and individual and who have forgotten how much the emotions we feel and the way we perform them are dependent on the contexts and well learned in social rituals of various kinds.

Here comes the first abstract:

TOUCHED BY YOUR WORDS, SEDUCED BY YOUR IMAGE – SEDUCTION AND THE BODY IN TIMES OF INTERNET (Pau Alsina, Natàlia Cantó-Milà, Francesc Núñez & Swen Seebach) – Presented at the Sexualities Research Network

Abstract: New forms of electronic communication (such as mobile texting, internet, emailing) are becoming increasingly relevant in our everyday lives – not only for organisational matters, but also in the webbing of the most intimate relationships between people in love, people searching for love or people for some fun in the cyberspace. Sex in written or spoken form, exchanged intimate pictures, are crucial in the webbing of those invisible threads that bind people together – seducing and being seduced – also in the net. But what happens with the body when it becomes a written description or the sum of scattered pictures over the computer screen? Is the body thus transformed or has it disappeared? And in which ways can a sexual relation take place, how is it possible to seduce and to be seduced, when the body, which was thought to be the basis of seduction, eroticism and sexuality, is turned into a series of ones and zeros? This paper seeks to explore the paths opened by these questions through an analysis of 35 autobiographical interviews in which the interviewees have reported the ways in which they relate to their current and past partners – online and offline. Through the analyses of these interviews we will attempt to depict the attraction felt by the virtual love relationship online, and, at the same time, that which happens when that which happened online is brought (back) offline.

The first presentation, ” Love and other demons in the Age of the Internet”, by Francisco Nunez, focused on some of the changes experienced by people in love during the last decades.

The image of platonic Eros, as a being that intermediates between the sensitive and the intellectual world allows us to focus on the theme of love from a sociological perspevtive, emotions in love relationships are neither just sensitve, nor intellectual but a mix. They are social emotions: Emotions are a set of mechanisms of perceptions, interpretation processes and physiological responses to certain stimuli. This means, following the ideas of E. Illouz on the topic, that emotions occupy a borderland between body and culture, they mediate within a place where body, cognition and culture are mixed.

The triangular theory of love by R. Sternberg, which describe the diversity of feelings of love as a combination of intimacy, passion and commitment, helped to us to focus especially on the transformations within these three spheres: transformations of intimacy, transformation of passion and transformation in commitment.

Following the paths of M Foessel’s book La privation de l’intim (Seuil, 2008), we explained how the inclusion of intimacy in the sphere of privacy opened the door to an increasing rationalisation and calculability of and within intimate relationships, especially in loving relationships. By rationalisation and calcuability we mean the ability to exchange, sell, buy and decide using a rational cost-benefit analysis. Furthermore, the processes and interactions of the two people in love became increasingly regulated by love contracts created by the two people in love.

The imprisonment of intimacy in the sphere of privacy, is perfectly consistent with the changes in our thinking about passion (as Eva Illouz shows us in her researches): We confuse passion with interest (economic interest), we associate passion with the pursuit of equality and personal satisfaction. The reason might be found within the new contexts we web our love relationships in: The power of control we experience (especially when people are looking for love in the Internet) satisfies us and we get the impression that we are transported from an experience of “blindness and infinity” to a circumstantially passionate and desirable love by the means of our power to control.

This idea is close to the concept of confluent love and pure relationship by Anthony Giddens. From Giddens’ perspective, love is a social relationship that individuals establish with each other and that will work as long as both parties feel sufficiently satisfied.

Moreover, Holschild, in an article published in 1995 (“The sociology of emotion as a way of feeling”) highlights the tension between the desire for the unconditional, on the one hand, and the uncertainty of the link, on the other. The result is that people in love start to follow the strategy of capitalist capital.(mobile and changing) to manage all their emotions. In this way they limit their emotional ties and adapt them to the culture of capitalism. The result is then a similar kind of emotions within capitalist culture. As Holschild remind us, “In managing feeling, we partly create it”.

A little girl posted a video in youtube in which she performed Lady Gaga’s last song. Lady Gaga watched the video, and announced publically (over Twitter) that she was deeply touched by the little girl’s performance, and that she had cried while seeing the video. Furthermore, as a subsequent consequence, Gaga called the little girl (in front of cameras and microphones) to tell her how much she had liked her performance, and telling her that, while seeing her video, she had been reminded of the reasons why she actually makes music. Thereafter Gaga answered the girl’s questions, sang a part of her latest song, live, as a duet, via the telephone, and, finally, invited the little girl to perform with her, Lady Gaga, on stage in Toronto.

Here we’re facing a situation in which the boundaries between public and private cross and melt. Lady Gaga’s public life (Lady Gaga performing Lady Gaga in front of the cameras) becomes an echo of her private life (her telling about crying and about the emotions and thoughts she had). Lady Gaga thus plays a double game: by telling about her secret emotions on Twitter, by carefully publishing information concerning what she feels, she creates and affirms a boundary between her performing self and her authentic (inner) self. But this boundary is just erected for being overcome within the very same situation.

Presenting her feelings and thoughts, Gaga gives the impression (true or not) that her fans do not just give meaning to Gaga’s life because they support her but that they are meaningful because they touch Gaga’s inner self, because they remind her of what she really is, and have therefore a therapeutic function for her, as they correct what the public music market, the constant performances… do to her.

The emotional interaction with her fans appears then as something that closes the inner chasm between what Gaga really is and what she performs. Gaga is (according to her words) released from public deformation. Through fans like the little girl, she learns something about herself, and rediscovers her real personality hidden and suppressed by a layer of performance.

But (true or not) this release, this recovery of her real self leads to another public presentation, to her presenting (and performing) publically what she feels, to transforming another part of herself into a consumption object, connecting it to the discourses of the public and subjecting it to the rules of public performance.

The interplay of being forced to analyze herself by the little girl’s video, to confess what she has found and the trans-performance of the discovered (hidden) emotions into public objects appear as a process of coming closer to Gaga’s real self. And as Gaga finds herself, the audience has the possibility to watch and identify with her, and to comprehend the therapeutic move inwards, towards her – self, to feel themselves as if they would have come closer to Gaga and to learn from Gaga’s turn how to come closer to their own selves.

Isn’t that the perfect example for what prosumption really means, (the impression of) producing and consuming your (and others’) consumption object; and, by doing so, learning to convert yourself into an object for consumption. In fact, prosumption should be called hyper-consumption, as the production is just secondary to the produced wish of being consumed to create further consumption.

So what happened in the particular case we are discussing here? Did Lady Gaga use the little girl, who transformed herself into Lady Gaga for her performance, and who objectified herself in front of a camera to promote herself? Or did she by promoting herself (by performing Lady Gaga) challenge Lady Gaga to expose something of her personal life that, in exchange, helped Gaga to gain extra profit and new fans? Who has obsessed who? Gaga the girl? The girl Gaga?

However, Gaga returned the gift of being touched, of retrieving her true self by personally interacting with the little girl, delivering a perfect emotional end of this little story. The perfect play of mirrors -between her and the little girl, reflection and counter-reflection, consumption and counter-consumption. At the end both end up in a situation in which they have turned themselves and their emotions into consumption objects. Gaga’s and Maria’s tears crystalized to visual consumption value. They, as their little story, have become (even more) objects of late modern culture.

Here the children are asked to identify the emotion this picture represents.

Emotional Puppets

Pictures that 3 years old children associate with joy.

PROJECT PRESENTATION
Nowadays, couples have to deal with the possibility to communicate 24 hours a day. This might change the forms of love relationships, the webbing of affective bonds in love relationships, the daily life of couples, the expression (and the acting out) of emotions within love relationships as well as the possible forms of engaging in a partnership.
We believe that we have found enough evidence to argue that we are facing significant changes and transformations, which modify the forms of presentation and interpretation of, and within, love relationships. These changes also contribute to altering the (possible) forms of commitment to a partnership.

JUSTIFICATION
The reasons why we think that this research project will deliver relevant contributions to our discipline are:
1. The expansion and normalisation of forms and practices typical to electronic communication in everyday life is (at least in Spain) an understudied subject, and this in spite of affecting a significant number of couples. Therefore, we need to find out more about the characteristics of the processes and changes that are taking place within partnerships, especially concerning those processes and changes related to the rise of electronic communication.
2. The research is focused on a key element of social life: the couple (the creation of a partnership, the maintaining of a partnership and the commitment to a partnership) that seems to us a crucial form of relation, and a key element for analysing and understanding society and social change.
3. The theoretical and methodological perspective developed within this research project will (hopefully) be an important and helpful contribution to the field of the sociology of emotions.

HYPOTHESES
The hypotheses that we consider (for the time being) the most relevant within this research project are:
1. The communication via the internet and via mobile phones (devices usually subsumed under the category of Information and Communication Technologies [ICTs]) in form of words, images and videos contributes to the modification of love relationship(s): The types and forms of partnerships, the forms of experiencing love and of committing to each other, the discourses on – and practices within – the relationships webbed by couples change with these new possibilities of communication, and thus of relation. Especially younger adults and teenagers have started to integrate the possibilities (and necessities) proposed by new communication technologies into their daily love life.
2. The new experiences, new practices and the new rising discourses on love relationships, shaped by the possibilities given by ICTs, lead to a change of meaning and a rationalization of emotional experiences in crucial moments of a love relationship (its creation, its maintenance and its end).
3. Electronic communication contributes to the facilitation of falling in love with different people, and it opens new grounds for falling in love (as it opens a new dimension wherein falling in love is exclusively based on imaginations and desires).
4. It contributes to the instability and relativisation of a commitment to a partnership, but at the same time offers the possibility to continue a relationship and to maintain the commitment despite being apart.
5. Furthermore electronic communication contributes to the creation of new ethical questions (regarding fidelity/infidelity, promise and commitment in a partnership).
6. Couples from the lower class or lower middle class make a different use of the possibilities given by electronic communication than couples from the higher middle class or the upper classes.
7. Electronic communication contributes to transform the conditions of/and possibilities for webbing, creating and recreating a love relationship by diversifying the possibilities a) to express emotions and feelings, worries and needs b) to take shared decisions c) to find and to get in touch with other possible partners. Furthermore they contribute to a diversified presentation in the different ambits and the different environments facilitated in ICTs
OBJECTIVES OF THIS RESEARCH
With our work we intend to contribute to the creation and consolidation of a sociology of emotions. Therefore we have set the following objectives:
1) To identify the practices (new forms of relationships and commitment) in, and discourses on, the relationships of couples that emerge and evolve in times of diffusion and routinization of electronic communication (communication via the computer (Internet) and mobile phones)
2) To show the effects on people and couples in love which are directly linked with the use of newest communication technologies and the communication that takes place and becomes possible via these technologies: effects on emotions and their interpretation, effects on possibilities and impossibilities for imagination, and effects on the processes of meaning giving.
3) To identify and show the conditions of the possibility to experience love in late modernity.
4) To show and analyse the ways in which conditions and possibilities for, and of, love relationships are presented and appear in congealed form in images and narratives in the media and in popular culture (movies, music, literature and self-help manuals).
5) To show the forms and manners through which electronic communication facilitates new forms of relationships of couples with a special consideration on the tensions between enhanced stability vs. enhanced possibilities to break up or to search for something new.
6) Continue the theoretical tradition of the Sociology of Experience (Soziologie des Erlebens), exploring and reflecting critically about its possibilities, opportunities and limits

DESIRED RESULTS OF THIS RESEARCH

At the end of this research project we would like to:
1) Know the ways in which the studied couples use and engage with the different forms of electronic communication, this also includes the practices that are nearly invisible, the fine invisible webs spun between the people that have a love relationship.
2) Map, analyse and understand the types of love relationships (those that started online and those that have not started online) that have become possible through the newest forms of individualization and through late modern capitalism, both crucially linked with the rise of electronic communication.
3) Figure out which forms and types of commitment(s) are dominant (or paradigmatic) in our contemporary society, the ways in which these commitments are constructed and lived, and the ways in which they are linked with dominant discourses on emotions and love relationships.
4) Know the changes and re-combinations of possible dimensions of love relationships, which happened to be during the last years. Especially changes regarding emotions and the forms of committing to each other will be important.
5) Analyse the ways in which discourses of the various, continuously changing, topics and dimensions that meet in the field of love relationships, and the contradictions between them, which are reflected and mirrored in the narratives presented by interviewees, in products of popular culture, in medial presentations, in counseling pages and in social networks.
Research Group GRECS (http://culturaisocietat.wordpress.com)
Pau Alsina González
Natàlia Cantó Milà
Isaac Gonzàlez Balletbó
Roger Martínez Santmartí
Francesc Núñez Mosteo
Ana Rodríguez Granell
Swen Seebach

Viviana A. Zelizer’s The Purchase of Intimacy (2005) unmasks the falseness of these two everyday life assumptions.  Zelizer, in her book, asserts that intimate relations are often deeply intertwined with economic relations. In her book she analyses those situations in which these intertwinements became problematic, and the implicated parties went to court. Through an analysis of the legal deliberations and resolutions, Zelizer shows the extraordinary work done in court in order to classify and pigeonhole relationships that are shifting and fluctuating, and the economic duties and obligations that, at a certain moment and place, are implied by these relationships.

It is indeed difficult to classify intimate relationships, but it is also difficult to understand and define what intimate relationships are in the first place. Taken for granted assumptions of our everyday life knowledge do not help bringing clarity to this matter.

It is worth concentrating for a moment on Zelizer’s proposed definition of intimate social relations. Zelizer asserts: ‘(l)et us thing of relations as intimate to the extent that interactions within them depend on particularized knowledge received, and attention provided by, at least one person – knowledge and attention that are not widely available to third parties. The knowledge involved includes such elements as shared secrets, interpersonal rituals, bodily information, awareness of personal vulnerability, and shared memory of embarrassing situations. The attention involved includes such elements as terms of endearment, bodily services, private languages, emotional support, and correction of embarrassing defects. Intimate social relations thus defined depend on various degrees of trust.’ (Zelizer 2005:14-15, our emphasis)

Thus, intimacy is intrinsically linked to vulnerability, and to the willful act of trusting this vulnerability to another person, or, and this is highly relevant, the act of being forced to do so. The magic moment of a first caress is intimate, the goodnight kiss of a loving mother is intimate, the patient’s description of her pain to her doctor is intimate, and so is the desperate cry of a raped woman, and the arduous breath of her aggressor. Intimacy per se is not cosy and warm, and vulnerability sometimes can be precious.

The form of intimacy, to put it in Simmelian terms, can thus be filled with many contents, pleasant, unpleasant, wanted, unwanted, desired, hatred. Intimacy is a possible form a relationship can take, and some relationships are possible within an intimate format.